Lost Paradise

by Susan Massotty

  I WOULD NEVER HAVE COME HERE BUT FOR ALMUT. Almut’s grandfather is German, as mine is. Ever since we started school, we have been known collectively as Almut and Alma. We laugh at the funny accents of our grand fathers, who came to Brazil after the war and never want to talk about their pasts. Even though they are constantly homesick, they have never been back to the Heimat. They weep and wail along with Fischer-Dieskau and the Kindertotenlieder . They want Germany to win the World Cup. But they don’t want to talk about the war, just as our fathers don’t want to talk about their fathers. Our fathers didn’t want to learn German either. Almut and I would like to, but it’s a beastly language. Everything is the very opposite of Portuguese: masculine nouns are feminine and vice versa. Death is masculine, the sun is feminine, and yet the moon is masculine – there is no rhyme or reason to it. A beastly language to learn, I mean, not to listen to, except when they shout. Almut is tall and blonde, so all Brazilians fall for her. I come up to her shoulder, and always have, even when we were kids. ‘I like it that way,’ Almut said. ‘I can easily put my arm around your shoulder.’ I thought she was prettier, but she thought she was too big. ‘I’m a Germanic ur-mother,’ she always said. ‘They should have called me Brunhilde. Now, look at those breasts. Whenever I walk down the street, I immediately have half a samba school following me. You don’t have that problem. That’s because of the shadow.’ The ‘shadow’ was one of her pet theories. ‘There’s a shadow inside you.’ ‘How can you tell?’ ‘I can see it in your eyes, beneath your eyes, on your skin, everywhere.’ ‘But what is it?’ ‘It’s your secret.’ I looked in the mirror that night and didn’t see a thing. Or rather, only my face. I’m not sure I have a secret. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Almut said. ‘You are a secret, even if you don’t realise it. No one ever knows what you’re thinking. When you say something, the words don’t seem to match the expression on your face. It’s as though you’re holding something back, a kind of “Trespassers Beware”. It’s bound to get you into trouble one day, but don’t let it frighten you.’

  I don’t remember how old we were when we had this conversation – probably about fifteen – but I have never forgotten it. Another thing she said to me was, ‘It’s as if you’re not alone, as if you always have someone with you.’ Almut and I did everything together, to the despair of our first boyfriends. We spent hours lying in the hammock on the porch, discussing our future. We were going to study art history – that had been decided already. Modern art for her, the Renaissance for me. ‘All those Crucifixions and Annunciations make me sick,’ she would say. We never agreed on this point. I could do without the Crucifixions, though it was fascinating to see how various artists dealt with the same subject, but it was the Annunciations that I adored. I have this thing about angels. Raphael, Botticelli, Giotto – as long as there are wings. ‘That’s because you wish you could fly,’ Almut says.

  ‘Don’t you?’ ‘No, not me.’ Her walls were lined with Willem de Kooning and Dubuffet and all those disintegrating figures and faces of the cubists that I disliked. Mine were lined with angels. Almut referred to it as my ‘aviary’. ‘What I hate about angels,’ she often said, ‘is that you can’t tell if they’re male or female.’

  ‘They’re male.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They have male names: Michael, Gabriel . . .’

  ‘It would have been much more logical for a woman to have come and told Mary she was going to have a baby.’

  ‘Women fly differently.’

  Which was absurd, since I had never seen a woman fly, but you know you are right about some things. Giotto, for example, got the idea for his swooping angels from seeing a comet. His angels fly through the air so fast that their feet are swallowed up in a trail of light. A woman would never fly like that.

  ‘Every so often I dream that I’m flying,’ Almut said. ‘I go very slowly, so you may be right. How do you think angels land?’

  I remember that moment with perfect clarity. We were in the Uffizi in Florence, looking at my favourite painting: Botticelli’s ‘Annunciation’. Almut had just finished saying that she had had enough of creatures with wings.

  ‘You’ve dragged me all over Europe to look at angels. Why don’t you put yourself in Mary’s place? There you are, sitting peacefully in your room, knowing nothing of what is about to happen, and suddenly you hear the flapping of wings, as if a giant bird is going to land. Have you ever wondered what it must have sounded like? You can hear the wing-beat of a dove, so imagine the flapping of wings a hundred times bigger. The noise must have been deafening: “Crew, prepare for landing.”’

  But I didn’t want to listen to her chatter. I have always been able to tune people out. The moment something touches my inner self – my secret, as Almut would call it – I retreat into my own world. I know other people are out there, but no matter who they are, they no longer exist for me.

  ‘There’s something creepy about it,’ Almut once said.

  ‘You’re no longer there. And I know you’re not bluffing.’

  ‘It’s concentration.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that. It’s absence. I might as well not be here. I used to feel insulted. There was something contemptuous about it. It was as if I didn’t exist any more, while all along it was you who didn’t.’

  I tuned her out. The first sight of a painting that you know only from reproductions is a kind of hallucination. You can’t believe you are actually looking at the real thing, that hundreds of years ago Botticelli stood before this very picture – staring at it with eyes long since turned to dust – and applied the finishing touches. I can feel his presence, hovering in the vicinity of the painting, but he is unable to get close to it. So much time has gone by that the painting has become something completely different, and yet it is the same physical object, and that is what makes it so scary. The original painting has a magical effect on me, producing an indescribable dizziness. If I also had to listen to the people going past the painting, giving it a quick glance and walking on, I would faint. I went to a candomblé session in Bahia once. The woman who was dancing was in a world of her own. If someone had shocked her out of her trance right then, she would have fallen in a heap. That is more or less how I feel.

  Quiet hysteria. Another one of Almut’s observations. Said with a smile, but still . . .

  Meanwhile, I have become wholly absorbed by the painting. Red rectangular floor tiles, a regular pattern whose straight lines contrast with the swirling motion and the pleats and folds in the clothing of the two figures for whom the rest of the world does not exist either. All is calm: the angel has just arrived. He kneels on one knee, his right hand reaching up towards the woman standing over him, who bends towards him. Their hands are almost touching, a gesture of electrifying intimacy. Both figures have their fingers spread wide, as if this is the language in which they wish to express themselves, since no words have yet been uttered. The woman looks away, otherwise she would see the fear in the angel’s deference. Few people, I believe, ever think about the inherent absurdity. A winged man flies into the room – his wings are still slightly outspread – and while that one tall spindly tree rises from the serene landscape in the Mediterranean light beyond the window, he bears a message from a world millions of miles away and yet so near, a world that knows neither time nor distance, a world that is now nestled inside the woman. I don’t know what divinity is. Or rather, I don’t know how to describe it. How do people bear the touch of the divine? I don’t think such a thing is possible. But if it is, it must look very much as it does in this painting.

  ‘You don’t believe in all that rigmarole, do you?’ Almut was bound to ask me that.

  ‘No, except that in the painting every bit of it is true.

  That’s what it’s all about.’

  Just then the angelus rang, which was of course also what it was all about. Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae. Some stories are powerful enough, even after two thousand years, even in the age of computers, to make
a bell ring. And Botticelli knew that.

  An hour later, as we were standing on the Ponte Vecchio, looking down at the swiftly flowing waters of the Arno, Almut said, ‘Try to imagine it.’

  ‘Imagine what?’

  ‘Making love to an angel. The wings must be a bonus – all that rustling and flapping when he comes. Or when he spreads his wings and flies off with you. The closest I ever got to it was with an airline pilot, and that was a total flop.’

  ‘The only angel you’d ever fall for is the one in the El Greco painting in Toledo, the guy with the scraggly wings who looks as if he’s being dragged into heaven.’

  ‘The one with the turned-up nose? Oh, thanks. Though he does radiate a lot of power.’

  I can count on Almut to bring me back down to earth.

  3

  I COUNTED ON HER THEN TOO. ALMUT DEALT WITH everything, coming down to the police station and taking me to a gynaecologist. I don’t know which was more humil-iating: the uniformed policemen who kept asking me what I was doing in the favela, making me repeat the story over and over so they could get off on it themselves, or the chromium table with those awful stirrups and the mumbling head down between my legs, looking for traces of semen – or even worse – and finally observing that I had got off lightly, though for all I knew he doubted anything had happened. The only person who was allowed to ask me why I had driven there that night was Almut.

  ‘Was it the mood?’

  Mood. Just a word, an ordinary word. Almut once told me that it comes from the Old Saxon mod , but I didn’t like the sound and have never wanted to look it up. Sometimes I would sooner ask a question than know the answer. Anyway, it was a code word between us; we both knew exactly what it meant. One day, when I was twelve or thirteen, I tried to explain to her how it feels – the terrifying fear that sucks me into a bottomless pit, as if I am about to tumble off the edge of the world. It is hard to put into words. You are dragged out to sea, incapable of resisting the pull, or actually not wanting to, since your one desire is to disappear forever, to be consumed by the menacing darkness, to seek out your fear so that you can surrender yourself to it, yet while all of this is going on you feel dizzy and you hate your disgustingly dizzy body – all you want is to be rid of it, to make it go away, to make the thinking stop. Rage, pleasure, melancholy are all rolled into one, and when it’s over, I’m left with a terrible sharpness – a white, electrifying clarity – in which I realise that I don’t want to be alive, that everything is riddled with hate – plants, ordin ary objects, the road I take to school every day – until that too subsides, leaving behind a sensual composure, in which I feel reconciled to the world again, though at the same time I know that the whole thing is paper-thin, transparent, an illusion, that I will never be able to make my peace with the world because I am part of it and yet not part of it – a contradiction I need to resolve. ‘You’ve got that look again,’ Almut would say at such moments. ‘Come on, let’s exorcise the demons.’ And then in her room or mine we would dance like mad to the music of Chico Buarque or the Stones or whoever, until we collapsed on the floor and lay side by side. From there we would set off on our great journey. Almut had an enormous map of the world taped to the ceiling. I can still see it. It wasn’t like most maps: Siberia and Alaska, looking strangely elongated, were not at the top of the map, but on the left and right sides; Australia had been moved to the top, making it look even more like an island, an island hovering above the rest of the world, and we knew we would go there one day, to that upside-down world where everything was different, where the whites were the descendants of convicts and felons who had clung to the edges of this huge island because the land in between was a broiling-hot desert inhabited by the others – the people who had lived there forever and looked as if they had sprung from the land itself: scorched, sun-seared beings who trod softly over the earth and lived as if time didn’t exist; they, too, lived an upside-down life unlike that of anyone else on the planet, as if all they had ever wanted was simply to be, and had passed down this changeless existence without ever changing anything in the world. We read about the Dreamtime, the time before time and memory began, when the world was flat and empty and shapeless and there were no trees or animals or food or people, until at a certain moment the Heroes, their mythical ancestors, appeared. No one knows quite how it happened, whether they came out of the ocean or the air or over the edge of the world. Os heróis creativos – in my language the words resound with an enchantment that still fills me with awe whenever I say them. Almut and I knew exactly what we meant when either of us spoke those words, for they invariably triggered our dreams and imaginings. We knew the country so well you would have thought we had been there a hundred times: Cairns, Alice Springs, Coral Bay, Kalgoorlie, Broome, Derby. One day we would go to Australia and travel through the desert from Meekatharra to Wiluna, and from Wiluna to Mungilli. We would crisscross the country, see Ayers Rock and Arnhem Land and the Nullarbor Plain, which looked like Mars. Australia was our secret. We collected everything we could lay our hands on: back issues of National Geographic , brochures from travel agencies, everything. Almut had hung up a print of something called the Sickness Dreaming Place: spirits, swaying white figures drawn on a cliff, surrounded by lines the colour of dried blood, lines that also ran through their bodies, which were divided into odd geometrical planes. They had no mouths, and red holes where their eyes should have been, and fan-shaped things above their heads. I don’t know how long we went on fantasising, but even now I can feel the intensity of our dreams. Sitting beneath Almut’s print, which I can picture clearly even now, we discussed everything of interest to us: boyfriends, quarrels at home, bad school reports, all of which melted away in the face of those swaying, healing spirits, who had become our spirits – patron saints we would one day visit, when we really needed them.

  4

  LOOKING BACK ON IT, I THINK THAT WHAT APPEALED TO us was that they never wrote anything down. There were no written records. All kinds of things were sacred, but nothing had been preserved in a book. Nor had they invented any machines, a fact for which they are often ridiculed, and yet they have survived for tens of thousands of years in a hostile environment, a kind of eternity without numbers, in which they had managed to live off the land without destroying it. There was no point in longing for a return to this way of life, because our world had been the death of theirs. The only visible clue to what they had been thinking during this eternity was their art, and even that was not intended to be permanent: sand drawings, body paintings applied during ritual ceremonies, art that belonged to everyone, except to us, because we did not have the keys to their secrets. All we could hope to do was scratch the surface. We wanted to understand it, but we couldn’t. It was at once an abstraction and a physical reality. How could that be translated into something you could understand? The Dreaming that had nothing to do with dreaming, but was a noun used to express an entire world order, from the origin of the universe to the time before memory began. It was too much for our seventeen-year-old brains to grasp, and to be honest, it still is. The lightning men, the rainbow snake, and all those other beings in human and non-human forms who created everything as they travelled through the chaos of the unformed world and taught people how to deal with the universe – it was all that and more. During the Dreamtime, their mythical ancestors had cast a net of Dreamings over the world. Sometimes a Dreaming belonged only to the people who lived in a certain place, but when they trekked across the desert, that same Dreaming linked them to people in other areas, even though they might speak a different language. This could be seen in the landscape – the spirits and ancestors had left tracks everywhere in the form of stones, water pools or rock form ations, so that future generations could read the stories and thus relive their own history. But that was not all. Not only did the Dreamings make it possible for people to see and recognise the still-active powers of those ancestral beings in the landscape, but each person had his own set of Dreamings that linked him to hi
s ancestors. All of this was expressed by means of what we now call art. You used it to express your own spiritual identity, your totem, which was linked to an animal or a physical feature of the landscape, to songs no one else was allowed to sing, to dances and secret signs – a cosmogony in which there were no written-down rules, but in which everything – literally – had its place, to which you or your group always returned, a world without a written language, but with a permanent encyclopedia of signs, still legible after tens of thousands of years, which would guide you to your rightful place. The more Almut and I read, the less we understood. It was too much and too complex, and yet it was its visibility that drew us back again and again and gradually gave us the feeling that we might be able to leave our own world. This was our secret, which we did not have to share with anyone else. One of our favourite photographs was of an old man painting the side of a cliff. He was sitting with his left leg tucked under him. You could tell by his frizzy white hair that he was old, though his body still looked young. It gleamed – all except his feet, that is, which were ashen and leathery, the feet of a man who had never worn shoes and who would soon walk away and leave his painting behind, someone whose way of thinking was very different from ours, who believed that the Creative Heroes had emerged into an empty world, that they could appear in the shape either of animals or of people, that they could change each other into rocks or trees or hurl each other into the air to create the moon or the planets. We never doubted for a moment that we would go there one day, and even after Almut and I went to Europe – Dresden, Amsterdam and Florence – as part of our art history studies, Australia kept calling and beckoning to us. At the mere mention of the place, we would look at each other with the conspiratorial smile of two people who shared a secret that no one would ever be able to take from us. After what happened in the favela , I didn’t leave the house for weeks. I had no wish to see anyone and couldn’t talk to my parents about it. Almut came to the house from time to time and sat by my bed. She knew there was no need for words, until the day she told me she had been looking into cheap flights to Australia. We could fly to Sydney. From there we could go to Arnhem Land and El Shirana, which was not far from Sleisbeck. We could go to the Sickness Dreaming Place. She did not need to elaborate. We both knew what she meant by that.